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We were met by our good friends Andy & Kate as we left the terminal, who kindly drove us to their home in Poole where we could get over the jet-lag before driving home to Devon tomorrow.

Home...........but what a great adventure!

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Sunday 23rd February.

It was a long trip back to the U.K., however the flights were pretty good. We were late taking off from Bangkok and delayed on landing. We were just about to touch down when the pilot powered up and climbed again. Aparently there was another aircraft still on the runway!

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We walked back to our hotel and waited for our taxi.

That’s it.

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Saturday 22nd February

We have to be out of our room by 10.00am, but we’ll leave the luggage until the taxi arrives for us at noon. Our flight is at 14.50hrs.

12+ hours to Bangkok, 4 hours in the airport and another 12+ hours to Heathrow arriving at 6.00am Sunday morning. Lovely.

It’s proper raining today. Luckily we haven’t seen much rain in the last 4 weeks, but they’re desperate for it in North Island.

We wandered down towards Queen Street looking for somewhere to have breakfast. In Vancouver there are cafés in every corner. Not here apparently. We ended up in MacDonalds. 🙄

When we came out it was raining quite heavily. Good job we are leaving!

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We weren’t sure what to do about eating. We both agreed that we would return to the Crab Shack and eat more of their delicious soft shell crab tacos, which we washed down with a little wine.

Later we walked to find a night market, but it wasn’t there.

We passed a street magician who was extremely good. We then headed back to our hotel. Neither of us were looking forward to the journey home.

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We found a pleasant bar where we took advantage of the happy hour, and sat and reflected on the near 7 week holiday that we had just experienced. We had made some pretty good decisions as how to go about the holiday, not least of which was renting a car and finding our own accommodation. We have had some wonderful experiences, been to wonderful places, seen some wonderful sights and spent time with wonderful people. We consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to do this.

And nothing went wrong!

On the way back we passed the Admiral Cup Headquarters. They take it very seriously over here. They are justly proud of their achievements. Up on the building was the flying catamaran with the controversial cycle seats, which helped them secure the win in 2017.

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We got caught by the lifting bridge.

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We saw Steinlager 2 go out, and an America’s Cup boat come back in.

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We decided to carry on walking in the docks area, to the Wynyard Quarter. Wow! There were some big boats moored up! There was a Targa 52 for sale, which looked quite small amongst the others.

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We duly met up with Lindsay & Vicki. We chatted as we walked to Yum Char. When we got in we sat down, and immediately the table was surrounded with staff, food was being put on the table from a trolley. Did we like this? Did we like that? Crikey! We hadn’t got a clue what was happening! Apparently, yum cha is a dining experience which involves drinking Chinese tea and eating dim sum dishes. Once we had understood that it all made sense. The food was delicious.

Afterwards, we walked through to Viaduct Harbour, where we were last night, to continue our conversations. We made outline plans to meet up in France in August, when Lindsay & Vicki will be on their canal boat.

They had to go to pick up some other friends and take them back to their island. So, for the 2nd time in a month we bade them farewell.

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Soon it was time to go to the ferry terminal to meet our friends. There was the most enormous cruise ship in the docks. It dwarfed everything else.

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Friday 21st February

This is our last full day in New Zealand, and were going out for lunch with Lindsay & Vicki. They’re coming across on the ferry (it’s free for Lindsay because he’s so old) and we are heading to a Chinese restaurant called Yumchar.

We walked through the bustling streets, popping into the odd shop if something caught our eye. Auckland wasn’t as clean as the other cities we’d been to in New Zealand, but there was much more going on. It was very cosmopolitan.

There were quite a few empty shops, but down the road there was Dior, Gucci, Prada and the rest.

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The Sky Tower looks superb at night.

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It was great. Our driver Punjab, put Elton John on his in-bike music system on off we went. What a great way to travel!

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We had a couple of drinks in a bar and headed back to our pub. It was several blocks so we took a cycle taxi.

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It was a great people-watching spot!

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Moored up on the waterfront we found the yacht ‘Steinlager 2’.

Steinlager 2 was S kippered by Peter Blake, she won the 1989–90 Whitbread Round the World Race and line honours in the 1989 Fastnet Race. She was the only yacht to ever win all six legs of the Whitbread Round the World Race.

Iconic.